Features

Subscribers of the Cooperative Support program have access to a comprehensive maintenance and support team. Unicon brings increased stability to your implementation by providing access to a staff of skilled individuals to ensure that the needs and business requirements of the program’s participants are met in a timely and professional manner.

Program Features:

• Support Requests
• Support Cases
• Development Issues
• Community Distribution
• Supported Modules
• Supported Sakai Modules
• Supported uPortal Modules
• Supported Releases
• Supported Sakai Releases
• Supported uPortal Releases
• Supported CAS Releases
• Supported Shibboleth Releases
• Maintenance Releases
• Patch Releases

Support Requests

There are two types of needs this program addresses: Production support cases that need immediate technical assistance, and development issues that are queued and prioritized by the collective support subscribers. When the Cooperative Support team is not working directly on support cases, they spend their time working on development issues, which might include bugs, enhancements, and minor new features. All work on development issues is done in direct participation with the community Sakai project for the benefit of all Sakai users.

Support Cases

A Support Case is a request for assistance reported by a designated account contact that requires a response in line with the SLA. The request could be for a production problem, a general question, configuration assistance, tuning advice, etc. When opening a support case the contact declares a priority level: high, medium, or low. The support team responds to the contact within the designated window and provides all necessary assistance to resolve the case to the contact's satisfaction. Subscriber information regarding support cases is held strictly confidential and is not visible to other subscribers. If the resolution of the support case indicates that changes are needed in the Sakai application (either to fix defects or to enhance current capabilities), then a corresponding development issue is opened. No development work is done directly as part of a support case.

Development Issues

A Development Issue represents any changes that the support team must make to the Sakai application to fix a defect, enhance existing capability, or add new functionality. Development issues may be reported at any time by designated account contacts. All development issues are automatically visible in the project issue tracking system so that all subscribers can review outstanding issues and register their votes for the ones they deem most important. The support team works on the most requested development issues in monthly iterations, with regular reporting to inform subscribers which development issues have been resolved. If a subscriber wants to bypass the typical process of prioritizing development issues by collective voting, the subscriber can choose to accelerate the development of an issue by paying an hourly rate according to their SLA and the issue will be included in the next iteration, or added to the current iteration if it is urgent.

Community Distribution

The publicly available community distributions are tested prior to being released and are established as stable, production-ready software. Unicon provides direct support for the community distributions of CAS, Sakai, Shibboleth and uPortal - it does not provide a commercialized distribution. Subscribers in the program can run the same CAS, Sakai, Shibboleth or uPortal distribution as other direct participants in the community project and still receive commercial technical support. Fixes and improvements that result from the efforts of the Cooperative Support team are developed in direct participation in the community project; therefore, the changes will be included in future community releases. Subscribers are also free to participate directly in the community project as much or as little as they choose.

Supported Modules

Supported Sakai Modules

The Cooperative Support program for Sakai provides support for a specific set of modules related to the Sakai project. Read this section for a comprehensive list of supported Sakai modules.

Supported uPortal Modules

The Cooperative Support for uPortal program provides support for a specific set of channels and portlets related to the uPortal project. Read this section for a comprehensive list of supported uPortal channels and portlets.

Supported Releases

The Cooperative Support program provides direct technical support for multiple releases of the community project. This means it is no longer necessary to always upgrade to the latest minor release of the project in order to get help with any problems. Cooperative Support subscribers can wait to upgrade until there is compelling new functionality available in the project.

Specifically, Unicon provides Cooperative Support for releases of Sakai or uPortal for 18 -24 months and gives subscribers six months notice prior to ending support for any specific release of the project.

Supported Sakai Releases

The currently supported releases of Sakai are:

Supported uPortal Releases

The currently supported releases of uPortal are:

Supported CAS Releases

The currently supported releases of CAS are:

Supported Shibboleth Releases

The currently supported releases of Shibboleth are:

While these extended support periods mean subscribers are no longer compelled to constantly upgrade, newer releases do tend to be more stable and provide better performance. Unicon’s support team does not perform upgrades on the subscriber’s behalf; although, we are available to provide basic assistance in the upgrade process. Unicon’s Service Team is always available to perform upgrades.

Maintenance Releases

At varying intervals, CAS, Sakai, Shibboleth and uPortal issue maintenance releases of the community distribution. These releases often include the changes made by the Cooperative Support team. By participating directly in the community project, Unicon avoids duplication of effort and provides valuable additional improvements to the entire community.

Maintenance releases are optional – they can be adopted whenever they contain compelling changes and improvements. These releases are the best method for all subscribers to receive the combined efforts of the Sakai project community and the Cooperative Support developers. The maintenance releases should be applied as recommended by the release notes included in the distribution.

Patches developed by the Cooperative Support team may require specific maintenance releases from the community project. Installations should be updated to the required maintenance release before any individual patches are applied.

The Cooperative Support team will assist in the application of maintenance releases when a support case is opened requesting this assistance.

Patch Releases

As individual development issues are resolved, the support team attaches patches to the corresponding entry in the issue tracking system. Once these patches are available, the support team can respond to any support cases addressed by available patches by assisting with the application of patches to a subscriber’s environment. The support team will provide you whichever of the following you prefer:

• A patched version of the appropriate community distribution
• A minimal set of binary files that you can replace in your existing deployment
• The modified source files from which you can build your own binaries